The situation
An alloy is made of two or more elements. Alloys are useful because blended elements are often stronger than their component parts, and they’re valuable because they make better tools. Bronze is an alloy; bronze tools launched humanity’s first historic age.
Fast forward a few millennia, and a global semiconductor company found itself in similar circumstances: acquiring another company so that the blended result could produce stronger, more innovative tools (and, hopefully, launch a new, historic chapter).
It wouldn’t be easy. Mergers and acquisitions (M&A) are among the most complex undertakings in business, and if the two organizations aren’t joined right, the result—like mis-producing an alloy—can be brittle and prone to failure. To be successful, the company would need to take two distinct sets of strategies, technologies, and talents and not just elevate the best of the two but harmonize them. Create something new. Something best in class. To assist with this process, the company chose to collaborate with Deloitte.
Mergers and acquisitions are increasingly complex. The right tool can make all the difference.
The solve
Deloitte’s professionals have deep experience in the semiconductor industry; experience they can bring to bear on the many inflection points in a business integration. They also come equipped with their own best-in-class tool: M&A CentralTM—a proprietary, market-leading, cloud-based program management tool that’s designed to support and accelerate M&A projects. M&A Central has a successful track record of helping clients manage highly complex, cross-functional programs, with particular emphasis on real-time collaboration and up-to-the-minute progress dashboards.
Normally, teams would meet in person to work through the myriad considerations that inform a harmonization, but this project started in 2020. And of course, nothing was normal about 2020. There’s uncertainty baked in to any deal of this scale—complexities in global compliance, for instance, make it hard to pinpoint when the acquisition will be officially complete and trigger planned changes. Centrally managing all initiatives in a virtual environment added an entirely new layer of challenge.
Both stakeholders’ and Deloitte’s capabilities and tools proved up to the task. M&A CentralTM was the center of a hub-and-spoke approach, a single source of truth through which far-flung teams still connected and collaborated to establish a current-state assessment of the organizations. Features like cognitive blueprinting gave team members real-time insights on the similarities and differences in the companies undergoing transformation and accelerated the decision-making needed to build integration strategies. Plans were still vetted, coordinated, and staged for execution despite geographic distance. And because the tool allowed for plans to be calibrated as dates came into sharper focus, timeline uncertainty was reduced to just one of many (manageable) dependencies.
Forging two sets of strategies, technologies, and talents into a stronger one.
The impact
If M&A transformations are complex and diverse, their primary goals are simple and uniform: close the deal. Thanks to Deloitte’s experience and the thorough scenario planning conducted with stakeholders, the transaction closed within a few days of clearance from regulatory agencies.
That wasn’t all. Throughout the process, leadership had been clear it wanted to make the most of integration and was willing to set aside approaches from both companies if a third, best-in-class option was possible. The teams took this to heart.
The result? Cross-functionally aligned and sequenced project plans—for customer-facing teams, for operations teams, for support teams—that positioned the newly blended company’s tools, talents, and strategies to indeed be better than the sum of their parts. Making the endeavor, despite its challenges, an un-alloyed success.
The right (transformation) tool can make all the difference.
